Fareed Zakaria commentary: Russia is endangering a global order that benefits the world

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Monday March 31, 2014 5:47 AM

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore an important debate about what kind of
world we live in. Many critics charge that the Obama administration has been blind to the harsh
realities of the world because it believes, as a
Wall Street Journal editorial opined, in “a fantasy world of international rules.” John
McCain declared that “this is the most naive president in history.”
The Washington Post’s editorial board worries that President Barack Obama misunderstands “
the nature of the century we’re living in.”

Almost all of these critics have ridiculed John Kerry’s assertion that changing borders by
force, as Russia did, is 19th-century behavior in the 21st century. Well, here are the facts. The
scholar Mark Zacher has tallied up changes of borders by force, something that was once quite
common. Since World War I, he notes, it has been on a sharp decline and in recent decades that
decline has accelerated. Before 1950, wars between nations would result in border changes
(annexations) about 80 percent of the time. After 1950, that number has dropped to 27 percent. In
fact, since 1946, there are only 12 examples of major changes in borders using force — and all of
them from before 1975. So Putin’s behavior in fact does belong to the 19th century.

The transformation of international relations goes well beyond border changes. Harvard’s Steven
Pinker has collected much of the data on wars in his superb book
The Better Angels of Our Nature. In a more recent essay, he points out that “after a
600-year stretch in which Western European countries started two new wars a year, they have not
started one since 1945. Nor have the 40 or so richest nations anywhere in the world engaged each
other in armed conflict.” Colonial wars, a routine feature of international life for thousands of
years, are extinct. Wars between countries — not just major powers, not just in Europe — also have
dropped dramatically, by more than 50 percent over the past three decades. Scholars at the
University of Maryland have been tabulating the number of new conflicts that have arisen across the
world, and they find that the past decade has seen the lowest number since World War II.

Many aspects of international life remain nasty and brutish, and it is easy to sound tough and
suggest that you understand the hard realities of power politics. But the most astonishing,
remarkable reality about the world we inhabit is how much things have changed, especially since
1945.

It is ironic that
The Wall Street Journal does not recognize the new world because it is created in
substantial part by capitalism and free trade. Twenty years ago, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, as
hardheaded a statesman as I have ever met, told me that Asian countries had seen the costs of war
and the fruits of economic interdependence and development, and they would not choose the former
over the latter.

This is not an academic debate. The best way to deal with Russia’s aggression in Crimea is not
to present it as routine national-interest-based foreign policy that will be countered by
Washington in a contest between two great powers. It is to point out, as Obama did eloquently this
week in Brussels, that Russia is grossly endangering a global order that has benefited the entire
world.

Compare what the Obama administration has managed to organize in the wake of this latest Russian
aggression to the Bush administration’s response to Putin’s actions in Georgia in 2008. Remember
that this was a blatant invasion. Moscow sent in tanks and heavy artillery to Georgia; hundreds
were killed and nearly 200,000 displaced. Yet the response was — essentially nothing. This time, it
has been much more serious. Some of this difference is the nature of the stakes, but it might also
have to do with the fact that the Obama administration has taken pains to present Russia’s actions
in a broader context and get other countries to see them as such.

There
is an evolving international order, with new global norms making war and conquest
increasingly rare. We should strengthen, not ridicule, it. Yes, there are some places that stand in
opposition to this trend — North Korea, Syria, Russia. The people running these countries believe
that they are charting a path to greatness and glory. But they are the ones living in a fantasy
world.